


the after hours

by andbless_mybaby



Category: American Horror Story
Genre: Child Abuse, F/M, Homophobic Language, Misogyny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:45:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andbless_mybaby/pseuds/andbless_mybaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twelve scenes from the (after)life of Tate Langdon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the after hours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hildigunnur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hildigunnur/gifts).



> The AHS finale didn’t air until the night before this was due. To preserve my sanity and stay in line with canon, the events in this story take place no later than 1.10, “Smoldering Children.”
> 
> Beta read by kathrynthegr8.

**i: the reality principle**

“You do realize that the word _therapist_ is ‘the rapist’ put together, right?”

Dr. Harmon steeples his fingers and slowly crosses one ankle over the other. A dirty little thrill ladders up Tate’s back: that move is normally reserved for really unsettling shit.

It’s a beautiful day outside, but the curtains block out most of it. There’s only a sliver of sunlight, garden, and wrought-iron fence that’s visible. It’s early November. Winter is creeping up on Los Angeles, chilling the windowpanes, and the good doctor is looking more and more constipated by his life these days. There’s an analog clock hanging on the wall, ticking away the minutes of the session.

“Since staying on topic and cooperating was part of our agreement for me keeping you on as a patient,” Ben reminds him, “I think we should go back to the topic we discussed last time.”

Tate’s inner smartass wants to comment that _the topic we discussed last time_ could refer to one of several things. But he’s making a good faith effort here, so he doesn’t point that out.

Maybe Dr. Harmon is thinking something too, because it takes him a moment to resume his exploration of Tate’s problems. “I think there’s some serious rage under all your facetiousness and provocative comments. I think it’s easier for you to test people - to startle them - than to potentially take the lid off all those angry feelings. You fear them. That rage. That’s what the dreams are about; they’re a manifestation of your latent feelings.”

For just a moment, Tate indulges himself and conjures up an abbreviated list of the ways he could murder Ben Harmon. He imagines the heft of the fire poker in his hands, the way he could skewer Ben like a fucking roast pig if he shoved hard enough. He imagines his head splattering like a gourd on the floor, brains and bloodspray on the paneling and pooling in the Batchelder fireplace. His body throbs in sympathy with the images, as if his own limbs could feel the pain he’s conjuring for the other man. He can see Ben’s face in a state of advanced decomp: no eyes, fingers half-gnawed off, mouth open and pulled back in a hideous rictus. The serene calm of control rushes under his skin like a drug, and he smiles.

“Nah, I’m not angry about anything.”

 

 **ii: rubber baby buggy bumpers**  
Tate’s always had something like a soft spot for Nora.

Before he learned how to walk, Constance would set him down in his playpen, go to the kitchen to refresh her drink, and come back to find him someplace else. It vexed her until the Tuesday afternoon (a commercial break for her afternoon soap was shorter than she expected) she found Nora Montgomery cuddling her baby on the settee.

“You put that child down right this instant.” Constance’s hand twitched, as if she were already gripping the fire poker she wished weren’t across the room.

That baby-snatching bitch had eyes so blue they were eerie.

“He’s _beautiful_ ,” she breathed. In her arms Tate cooed, bounced, and yanked a handful of her taffy-colored hair. “How old?”

“Five months.” Constance eased herself onto a chair, not taking her eyes off the dead woman. (And oh, she knew she was dead – knew without seeing that hole in the back of her head. Dead people have a _look_ to them, even if they are dressed nicely and act perfectly civilized.)

“I lost my baby.” Nora mournfully tangled Tate’s soft curls in her fingers. “He was fair too. A beautiful boy."

“You sure he’s not still around here somewhere?” Constance lit a Pall Mall. “I must say, there are plenty of creepy-crawlies in the woodwork. Maybe you have not looked hard enough.”

Nora smiled nervously. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind sharing this one sometimes? I do so love having a sweet baby like this to hold.”

Constance laughed hard enough that she choked on her first drag.

“Share! You want to share that baby, missy, you come and change a few reeking shit diapers now and then. You go deal with him at night when he’s croupy. I’ve got my hands full. If you want to share, be my guest.”

“Oh! I had a nanny. I confess that I don’t know much about – diaper pins.” With her free hand, Nora fingered the beading on her dress. “How does one keep from getting stuck?”

“Pampers,” Constance replied. “Hand over that kid.”

Constance took Tate, who was sleeping by then, and put him down in the nursery. By the time she’d come back downstairs, she realized that the ghost girl was gone, and she’d missed a good fifteen minutes of her program.

“Well, shit,” she said to the good-looking actors on her TV screen.

Addie was off at her school for mistake children making blobby Play-doh sculptures for a few more hours; Beau was quiet under the eaves. The house was, all of the sudden, overwhelmingly still. Constance couldn’t abide it. She’d take a score of rampaging poltergeists any day; silence unnerved her.

So she went back to the kitchen to splash a bit more Jim Beam on her iced tea.

Tate’s heard the story enough times that he is probably imagining that he remembers it. Probably.

That doesn’t explain why, sometimes, he’ll be passing through and see an entire scene play out in the corner of his eye – there’s crib midget Tate, there’s Mom in her day dress, there’s the smell of crumb cake and mint sprigs, there’s poor crazy Nora with the hole in her head – like he’s a one-man audience and there’s a troupe of shadows running lines in the living room.

 

 **iii: sucker love**  
The movers arrive before the house’s new owners. Two trucks back up the driveway – the large size, Tate gauges, lots of stuff. He sees leather couches, big bookcases, moving boxes that are all neat and uniform and labeled perfectly. _Send in the yuppies._

He hangs out in the closet in his room -it will always be his room- while the guys grunt and sweat. They are talking in Spanish, which he was never really good at, so he doesn’t get more than just a basic gist. One dude almost busts the stained glass window at the landing trying to maneuver a fussy little end table up the stairs. (Tate’s a little disappointed when it doesn’t happen.) It’s strange to see the rooms taking shape again: curtains on the window, rugs in the hall. Even just having all the doors open seems to blow life into the house for the first time in over a year. There’s so much fresh air, all at once.

The movers are left alone. Tate can almost hear the sound of every dead fuck in the walls holding their nonexistent breath, just waiting to get a better glance at the new family. If this were a horror movie, someone would probably comment that they felt like they were being watched. But the guys just do their thing and pile in the boxes and leave at five on the dot. Scuff marks score the hardwood, and the plastic on the furniture crinkles with every little draft. Once the trucks pull away, there is nobody to stop Tate from poking around.

The power’s not on yet, so the chandelier casts no light in the blue room. The shadows tell him nothing useful. The wrought iron bed frame is quiet. He runs his hand over the dresser, opens the drawers. In the first, he finds underthings – a tangle of nondescript, small-ish bras specifically. Oh, the _daughter_. He’d seen her when she and her parents first looked at the house, a mousy thing in a yellow cardigan.

Her panties are all piled up underneath. They are nothing sexy or spectacular, more dark colors. She, he thinks, is _really_ committed to her blacks and grays. He can’t help giving them a sniff, right at the crotch seam where her sweet little slit would go. They smell like laundry detergent, mostly, but - yes, there - there’s the smell of the girl underneath. He’s huffing the panties so hard that there’s cotton stuck up his nose, thick and suffocating. All so he can catch the faintest hint of her scent, all sea brine and perfume.

He’s got that rattling around his brain when he watches her unfold herself from the car, the intimate smell of something he doesn’t have a name for just yet. He’s muzzy in the head with curiosity, his mouth gone slightly dry as he watches her stretching in the sunlight.

Her name is Violet. For the first week he creeps her, utilizing his talent for being somewhere and not being there at the same time. At first it’s just watching as she reads or listens to music. He lingers on her windowsill, invisible while she uses her computer to talk to a friend in Boston. The first time he sees her naked is when she’s just come in from a shower, and after that her morning routine is must-see entertainment. He’s pretty sure he’s going to jerk his dick raw.

It’s not really a coincidence when he meets her for the “first” time, walking in on her and her razor. He gets a jolt off how much prettier she is when she’s looking straight at him, all pissed-off and defensive.

What he really likes is the hint of fear there, though. It’s small and subtle, but it’s there. Violet says she’s not afraid of anything, but Violet is a little bit of a liar.

(That’s okay. He likes that, too.)

 

 **iv: agnus dei**  
Here’s a real secret, something that doesn’t really matter anymore because nobody remembers it: Tate liked school.

He used to love track in the winter when the cold air snapped through his chest like a rubber band and he could just _run_. None of that other stuff. There were no mental sidetrips to Constance and her lame, asshole boyfriend, to Beau in the attic rattling his chains at one AM, to Addie having conversations with thin air. It was like, when he was running, he went down a long tunnel where he couldn’t turn around and couldn’t see anything but what was in front of him. He came in second at a district meet, and that was pretty awesome.

If he thinks about that time - not that he does - it’s true that he had no friends. That was fine, though. It’s not like he could bring anyone home to the freakshow, so he didn’t mind that a lot of people kept their distance. (Tate wasn’t scary, exactly, but let’s put it this way: when people thought about What Ended Up Happening with him, honestly - they couldn’t say they were completely surprised.)

It’s hard to say when things changed. He’d never thought of killing anyone before junior year, and then one day he woke up and it was on his mind constantly. A filthy black thing had wiggled up into his heart and grown diseased and fat like a slaughterhouse animal. Tate would come home from school and go straight up to his room and close the curtains and try to make it fucking _stop_ , but the thoughts attacked him from all sides. Only letting them in, listening, absorbing what they were trying to say, would bring him peace.

The blow started over Christmas break, the only way he could deal with Constance and her shit. It never has been and probably never will be hard to get coke in Los Angeles. You don’t even have to know the right people. You just have to know where they hang out: which bathroom to visit during second lunch and how to start the conversation. Everything is so filthy. It’s so fucking depraved. You get your little baggie from the dude sitting on the counter with the smell of piss and sweat stink, and nothing is ever, ever clean.

When he closed his eyes those nights, everything in his head was squirmy and oily with the shit of the world all over it. He dreamt of nuclear winter, of a rupture so huge it would wipe everything out and leave nothing but space.

The guns were easy. The fake ID had been no harder to get than the drugs, and between three different pawn shops he found everything he needed. He smiled when he filled up the gas cans for Larry. He couldn’t help feeling that he was going to get something really special. The night before, at dinner, he listened to that stupid fuck chew his meat and scrape his plate, and he imagined how his face would melt into hamburger.

Tate woke up on the last morning of his life to a low, exciting buzzing, as if the voices knew what he was doing and were appeased. He felt the walls closing in on him, shoving him out. They were looking at him as he tucked the bullets into the depths of his long coat, as he flicked a few matches to make sure they were live. The room smelled like sulfur and gunmetal. A little like blood, almost.

When he arrived at Westfield High, the fourth period bell had just rung. He was one full gas can lighter, and his fingers were tingling. When he walked down the hall, his drug dealer saw him and looked up for just a moment. Tate couldn’t tell if he recognized him. He clicked the trigger once, and blasted the stupid look right off his face.

After that there was only the good, clean deafness that came with the white powder: stillness like a clear sky day while, around him, his classmates screamed on mute and flew away like birds.

 

 **v: more ceilings than michelangelo**  
Hayden slithers over his lap, and turns on her crooked, fucked-up smile. She runs two fingers down the side of her face, and he pictures the black lacquer of her nails leaving a line.

“Aww, sweet baby.” Sing-song. “Such a big boy. Did you play mommy and daddy with your wittle girlfriend? Was it nice? Was that the first time that you got inside a girl with your itty bitty co-”

He slaps her hand aside. “Fuck off.”

“Ooh, _rough_. No worries.” She wriggles a little, bouncing against his dick. “I like to get slapped around a little. I’m more fun than Violet like that.”

He stands up, upending the chair and knocking Hayden on her ass in one sharp movement.

“Were you like this when you were alive, or was it getting a shovel to the face that turned you into such a bitch?”

“Tate. Tate, Tate, Tate.” Her laughter is as jagged as broken glass. “You have no sense of humor whatsoever, do you?”

“Don’t talk about her. You don’t get to.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t do.” Just like that, she’s deadly serious. Back on her feet, she ignores the fresh tear in the elbow of her shirt. “Newsflash, kiddo. Your teenage angst is just precious, and your situation is pathetic enough that we all feel bad for you, but you aren’t special. You’re no better than any of the other sad sacks in this house.”

“What do you mean, ‘my situation?’” Tate asks. “What are you even talking about right now?”

Hayden’s pointy-toothed smile cuts through the shadows.

“We’ll talk later,” she says. “Later, baby Tate.”

“What are you talking about?” he repeats.

But he’s only talking to the dust, because she’s not there.

 

 **vi: you look so good in (prussian) blue**  
He likes the way her name curls itself back on his tongue before the sharp rise up. He know that she loses her composure when he says it like that, slow and filthy.

“How have you imagined this, Violet?” Her neck is white and soft, and when he sucks on it he imagines the delicate blood vessels bursting under his lips. She always has hickeys when they’ve been alone together. “Did you picture us doing this in the dark, so you wouldn’t be embarrassed? How did I get you ready? Did I finger you first, get you nice and wet-”

“ _Stop_ ,” she mumbles. “I don’t like when you talk like that.”

There he goes again, freaking her out with the dirty talk. She just gets him like this. It’s four in the afternoon, her mother is out at Whole Foods, and her dad is updating files in his office. Her homework is pushed to the end of the bed. Hasta la vista, Mussolini and his boring fascist ass.

He kisses her apologetically, smoothing her hair on the side of the pillow. Softer. Violet breathes a bit easier, and unclenches the fist she has around his t-shirt. Her other hand is curled around his neck. Her palms are sweating a bit.

It’s just that everything about her is the best thing ever: the ashy taste of cigarettes when they’re making out, the thin ladder of scars up her arms, her small breasts. Sometimes it feels like he opens his mouth and this inappropriate shit rolls out on its own, like it’s being hammered out by his heart. He wants to do all kinds of nasty things to her. He wants to rub his inner filthiness all over her, make her just like him. She’s perfect for him.

The best part is that she’s starting to let him. Do things. Violet _likes_ him. He’s her boyfriend. She likes the way he touches her, and she wants to make him happy.

That’s what he’s thinking when he kisses his way down her stomach, and rucks up her blouse: how he’s in love with her. It’s a tattoo on his brain when he peels her leggings off; it’s what he’s thinking when she parts his legs and he slides between them, high on her smell and thinking drunkenly that he’s going to go down on her until she screams, until Dr. Harmon runs upstairs and bangs on the door. He touches her, but there’s no need to do anything, actually: she’s completely wet. Tate slides two fingers up around her clit, and his gut clenches with the way she twitches and sucks up a pretty little breath. Closing in slowly, slowly, he breathes over her.

Violet lets out a little moan that isn’t quite right.

He pushes up, looks at her from between the bookends of her knees.

“I can’t do this,” she says. Her eyes are big, spacey. Her mouth is all swollen and spit-shiny. He’s made her a little chickenshit, he realizes, and that excites him more than it should. He wants to say _you don’t need to do anything, just let me make you feel fucking amazing_ , but he respects her boundaries. Even though he didn’t sneak so much as a kiss, he wipes his mouth on his sleeve. His dick is going to be hard forever. He’s positive.

“It’s okay,” he tells her. It takes some effort. He flops back on the bed, spreads his arm out invitingly. “We can just hang out. Finish your history assignment. It’s due in two days, right?”

Violet sits up and straightens herself up. (He adjusts himself in his pants when she’s not looking.) “Yeah.” She nods. “Let’s do that. We’re okay, right?”

His smile is gentle for her. “Hey. We’re great.”

Ultimately, they don’t end up doing much at all. The afternoon drags slowly into evening, and it gets pretty dark in her bedroom with all the curtains drawn, but neither of them get up to turn on a lamp. They have this random conversation about animals at the zoo (Tate thinks they’re evil - the zoos, not the animals - and Violet tells him about seeing elephants dance at Franklin Park when her parents took her when she was a kid), and then curl against each other on one side of the bed. He thinks they probably doze off for a while. It seems like a while has passed when he hears her talking again, and her voice sounds sleepy:

“-I figured that, if I got under its foot, I’d completely get crushed and die.” Oh, the elephant again. “Do you ever think of dying?” she asks him. Quickly, like the words were waiting a long time and just tumbled out.  
“Weird segue. But - sometimes. I had a dream about the zombie apocalypse last week,” he tells her. Her hair slips between his fingers as he pets her scalp idly. “It was awesome. You were in it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It turns out that you are pretty good with a fire ax.”

 

 **vii: real ~~live~~ girls**  
Moira ignores him, mostly.

She’s like one of those gag portraits that changes the picture depending on how you look at it. Lenticular. Sometimes he sees her the way he did when he was five and she was beautiful, sulking around the house with things that are more ridiculous props than actual cleaning tools. Feather dusters. Rags and buckets for cleaning the floor on one’s hands and knees. He thinks he saw her with a washboard, once. Sometimes she’s old and wearing a faded black dress buttoned to the neck, glaring at the world as she polishes silver.

When they do speak, she refers to him as “the young master.” There’s a spitting insolence to it, and Tate’s fairly certain that she hates him.

At least she’s interesting sometimes, which is more than can be said for the nurses, who apparently got stuck in the “fucktard zombie” class by the sorting hat of the afterlife. He wonders if they were this dumb in life, and maybe it’s just the case that you can’t really stab brains into a person. Shame, because Maria’s not unattractive. They aren’t around much, and Tate’s not quite sure where they go. There are worlds under the floorboards, portals to nowhere through the bottom of the bathtub. One could hole up in their little cubbyhole and stay forever, but the ghosts never seem to do that. Things always come out of the woodwork, as they say.

There’s stuff he still doesn’t understand about the house and the people in it. Some of them - like him and Hayden - seem to really get the score. They are aware of who they are, where they are, and the passage of time. Then you have Nora, still dragging her long dresses around and tending to forget that her brains are leaking out the back of her head. There’s Larry’s old lady and kids, who smell like well-done steak and leave a trail of soot and smoke wherever they go. And then there’s Moira, who year after year looks more and more like she’s sucking a lemon. Her milky, blind eye is always on the house: shining the bannisters, washing the windows.

Tate isn’t afraid of the house, although he wonders sometimes if he should be. It speaks its own language; it groans and shifts. There are mornings he swears the upstairs hallways is a little more narrow than it was the night before. It’s as if the clean, fashionably-furnished fascade the house presents is nothing more than a hologram, he thinks. If you could look at it the right way, you’d see the bloodstains on the walls and floors, the burned-out shells of rooms, and the broken windows making obscene faces down at the sidewalk. The house sees everything, knows everything, forgets nothing. It belongs to nobody. They think they possess it, but all the house has done is sucked them into its hands and teeth. The lawn gathers around the house like a lady’s train, rattling with bones.

 

 **viii: diminishing returns**  
“What are you going to do about school?” he asks her, later that afternoon. “You’re too smart to be a dropout.”

“I don’t care about school. It’s a load of shit.” It would be one thing if those words were the whine of a disgruntled teenager, but Violet intones them as absolute fact. They’re flat and emotionless, which is typical of 99% of the things that Violet says these days. His moody, withdrawn Violet grows paler than pale, holed up in her room all day with her iPod set to a constant loop of indie emo rock and dirty dishes piled on the desk and starting to get funky.

She doesn’t seem like she’s really in the mood to talk, so they fool around instead. She smells a little ripe and there’s fuzz on her legs, but he doesn’t care about that stuff. Her mouth is hotter than it’s ever been against his, wet and open.

That afternoon, she doesn’t tell him to stop when they’re messing around. He gets naked, but she just pushes her skirt up. He takes her virginity and she’s mostly still dressed except for her bare legs and the toes she digs into his calf when he pushes inside. She doesn’t cry or anything like that, but her knuckles are white.

When he comes, it’s so intense that he swears he passes out for a moment. Violet’s watching him with a crooked, confused look, and he pulls her down by her shirtfront to kiss her mouth.

Later, he wiggles down into the crawlspace. Violet’s body is where he left it, still a secret. There’s nothing down there but dirt, and the close walls form something like a mausoleum. It’s peaceful there. Nobody else will bother her. Two weeks postmortem, she’s looking the worse for wear, and there are a lot of flies. Tate doesn’t mind. Loving someone means you overlook stuff like that. Her mouth is open in a silent scream. The worms crawl in and out.

Up in her bedroom, the ghost of Violet Harmon is taking a shower. She’ll be back to sulking soon, but he thinks she needs him more here right now.

 

 **ix: that boy is a monster**  
While Chad and Patrick are out, Tate applies himself to learning how to use the internet.

It was hard, but not as hard as it could have been. When he last touched a computer, Windows NT was the newest thing. He’d been pretty big into playing Doom, and had even created a few levels. He wasn’t a hacker supergenius, but he could hold his own with code and programming.

Today’s World Wide Web blows him away. It’s _fast_ , and bigger than anything he could have imagined back when he was listening to the shriek of his dial-up connection in the basement. It’s slick. He could shop for anything, find anything out, steal any music or movies he wanted to watch... mind-blowing. The internet is how he catches up on the last 13 years of human life.

Consequently, he knows Pat’s dirty little secret long before Chad, knows what landmines are lurking on his browsing history. Tate’s never heard of the BDSM community, so it’s with fascination that he follows the breadcrumbs. He sees the leather daddies with their mustaches and floggers; the pictures of twinky submissives with their asses kissed by red slashes. Bootblacking, breast torture, bastinado. He sees chat transcripts of Pat’s new friend, catches wind of them falling in love through their freaky little conversations about buttplugs. What he understands is that Pat is a traitorous slut that’s going to ruin everything.

It’s only a matter of time before Chad catches on, of course. And then things start to get rocky in Casa Homo. There are angry words, accusations, broken Lennox china from the set they’d received as gifts from their commitment ceremony. Nora is crying again, mourning the loss of another baby that was never to be. The murder house is getting restless, thriving off the violent energy. The trompe l’oeil demons throb through the tasteful wallpaper. They’re licking their chops. When Tate watches the two of them, he feels rage dig little claws into his spine. Fucking _faggots_ , he swears. They couldn’t even get this together to make everyone happy. It had to fall apart now. Well, Tate knows how to fuck things up too.

Chad’s failed experiment at revving his lover’s engine is hanging up in the bedroom. Tate looks it over. The black rubber almost stands on its own, molded exquisitely into fingers and toes. Chad’s taller than him, but the latex stretches over him just fine. It fits. There’s a funny zipper at the crotch to let his cock out, which he tests two or three times just for the hell of it. When he pulls the hood down, Tate kind of gets it. He didn’t understand at first what kind of sick pervs would get off on pain when there’s already so much of that shit in the world. But there’s a certain cool, detached calm that comes with the suit. It holds one in, it takes them away from being a person. They’re just a thing. No thoughts, no emotions, just purpose in a fucked-up little headspace. He decides that he likes it.

He waits for Halloween night to get the job done. It just feels right.

 _It won’t matter if she finds out (she must never, ever find out), but Tate was thinking of Violet the night he crept into Vivian’s bed. He knew he was committing an unforgivable sin, but it was something he thought about only in the shallowest sense. He didn’t really care. He had a job to do. He checked the zipper again. It worked. In the shadows of the basement, he jerked himself off with a palmful of spit until his balls were tight and he was panting. Ready._

 _Dr. Harmon wandered around the house, igniting all the jets on the stove. He was dazed, Tate could tell. His eyes were glazed over, unfocused. He walked as if in a dream, listing off the walls as he mumbled something about burning. He was heading for the fireplace._

 _The rubber suit sucked at his throat like a kiss. He could barely breathe. Tate headed upstairs._

 

 **x: beelzebub has a devil put aside for me**  
In death Hugo’s enough of a dipshit that Tate is kind of glad he never established much of a parental regard for him before Constance fed him a lead sandwich. Tate was always told that he went deadbeat, but Constance killing him makes so much sense that he wonders why he never thought of it. Dad was here the whole time, for all the good it’s done anyone.

It’s like Days of Our Purgatorial Lives. Hayden is fucking Hugo, Hayden is fucking Travis, Hayden is smiling at Tate with a knowing, pointy smile, and he wishes he didn’t know she is pretty smart.

When Tate was born, Hugo told Constance _no more goddamn Gone With the Wind shit_ , otherwise Tate figures he probably would have ended up a Bedford or a Glorious Robert Lee or something. For that, he figures he owes the old man a favor. He tells him to back off the crazy, but Hugo doesn’t want to listen.

“Are you jealous, son?” Tate knows he doesn’t mean that in the literal sense; he has no actual idea who Tate is. “That gal is a pistol. Got a lot of fight in her. She’s fun. I don’t tell my wife, of course. She doesn’t know anything if I have a bit of fun sometimes.”

Sure she doesn’t.

If Hugo and Moira and dead, then by all rights Larry should be as well. Tate would rather be dead, if he were Larry. Larry’s brand of pathetic is almost too much to choke down. It’s not his Freddy Kreuger face or his gimpy arm, it’s the stink of the bottomfeeder that he wears like cologne.

One day they are reading together in the living room, and Violet looks up out of the open window just in time to see Larry shuffle across the lawn. Probably going next door to grovel at Constance’s slipper and see if there’s any errands she needs him to run. Violet lets out a little yelp, and tells him that’s the guy that kept ringing the doorbell on Halloween.

“Don’t mind him,” he tells Violet. Loudly, so the sound will carry through the screen. “He’s just a creepy old _fuck_. He likes you. I think he has a thing for little girls.”

The words are calculated to sting, but Larry just stops, turns, and glares Tate down with his good eye. Tries to, at least. Tate has never lost a staring match, and he’s not about to start now.

 _He called her “mama” for the last time when he was eight years old._

 _At night sometimes he’d lay awake, listening to the springs of her oversized bed groaning, and to the sounds of heavy, unfamiliar footfalls on the stairs. He knew the men were there, but he rarely saw their faces. Never knew their names. He’d catch their stink on his mother the next afternoon when she’d roll out of bed and gather the soiled sheets to bring down to the wash. He didn’t have the word for it then, but he already knew she was a cocksucker._

 _(There was the one that crept into Tate’s room one night. There’s a pair of torn rocketship pajamas behind a board in the attic, a token that the house is keeping. Tate doesn’t remember that now. Nobody else does, or wants to. It’s another secret. )_

 _One night he woke up thirsty. He was getting over being sick, and he badly wanted a glass of cold water. The kitchen was downstairs, though, and Tate was afraid of the dark._

 _He peeked out when he heard her door open and her voice in the hall. There was a tall man with her, a guy with dark hair in a ponytail. It took a minute for Tate to recognize him as the lawn man. He wasn’t wearing any clothes, which was probably why he didn’t know him at first. There as a thatch of dark hair between his legs, and his penis hung down limp. Tate tried to shrink himself back inside his room, but Constance spotted him._

 _“That’s my Tatey,” she gestured with a big, infatuated smile. It was the one she always uses when she talked about her youngest son. Her negligee was half-buttoned and sagging; one of her breasts was about to fall out completely. “Isn’t he absolutely gorgeous?”_

 _The guy barely looked at him. “He’s great. You have anything to eat?”_

 _They shuffle off, and Tate never did get his drink of water. The next day, Constance slept in until three PM. The phone rung on and on until he took it off the hook. Probably the school’s office wanting to know why he was absent again. Addie made him a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, but it wasn’t very good._

 _It was like a light flicking on suddenly, the thought that he hated her._

 

 **xi. not with a bang**  
The second time happens right there on her floor, on top of the dust bunnies and their abandoned game of rummy.

Violet’s mouth is smiling, but her eyes are so goddamn sad. He knows that if he tries hard enough he will make her see what a gift this is, how special it is that now they have forever together. It’s a lot for her to deal with right now. He can understand. She looks up at him from underneath her lashes, though, and it makes his insides twist in a knot. This is real: she will never leave him. She’s all his. He needs to show her - something.

He pulls her on top of him right there in the middle of the floor, kisses her slow. She answers savagely, biting his lip and licking the backs of his teeth. She tilts her head back and offers her throat. Humming against her skin, he rubs up and down her arms. She’s a little colder now. It’s hardly going to warm her up again, but he can’t help wanting to take care of her.

Meanwhile, her hands work quick. She undoes his belt, pulls his cock out, is over him and rutting down before he even catches up with what’s going on. He’s aching, his body already anticipating hotwetfuck _amazing_ she will feel, but Tate’s hands tighten on her upper arms.

“Hey, easy,” he says into her clavicle. “Take it slow.”

“Don’t be a baby,” she tells him. She shrugs him off, and ditches her sweater. “Just do it.”

She’s having trouble with the buttons on her dress, so she lets him help her. Static electricity catches her hair and makes it fly. Off come her bra and his shirt, like she’s trying to set a world record. She’s about to rip her tights off in the same manner when he puts his hands over hers. “Let me.”

Violet stands with arms akimbo while he skims off her tights, dragging her underwear with them. He rubs her thighs gingerly, and looks up at her. Violet doesn’t flinch, and so he repeats: “Let me?”

Her nod is abrupt.

Tate parts her knees, and, before she can think about this and maybe change her mind, licks a long stripe up her cunt. She sucks in a breath, and steadies herself with a hand tangled in his hair. He opens her up with his hand, and mouths at her hungrily. She’s not as turned on as she pretended, but he can work on that. He gives her two fingers, feels her clench. Above him, Violet’s back arches.

It takes a really long time and he’s worried about his dick pretty much exploding, but he gets her to come for him, all musk and wet heat crashing against his chin. By the end she’s wobbly on her heels, clenching his hair and moaning into her shoulder. The cry she makes sounds like a sob. She sinks down as she’s shaking through it, and his hands feel numb as he fights to get his pants and shoes off.

It’s all he can do to lay prone on the floor, paralyzed with lust, while she lowers herself onto him and starts to rock. He grabs her hips hard enough to bruise, and curls up to kiss her breasts, her collarbones, her ears and face and chapped pink lips. His hands climb her ribs, pull her down, and he’s crooning “I love you. I love you. I’m going to love you _forever_ ” in her ear without even knowing it. The floorboards creak under Violet’s knees, and there’s something with needle teeth grinning through the doorjamb, but they are both too far gone to notice.

(Later on he’ll take the Queen of Hearts, color her dress black with a Sharpie, and slip it under Violet’s pillow while she sleeps.)

 

 **xii: three of swords**  
Funny things happen when the dead play with Ouija boards. In truth, that’s some scary shit – but hey, if you’ve already shuffled off the mortal coil, it’s not like you have much to fear. Tate can talk to dead people any time, any day. He’s normally got better things to do than play children’s games, but he pulled the board out for Violet, and he’s been meaning to revisit it.

The board used to be Constance’s, a throwback to a time when she actually got her hands dirty doing her own divination, before Billie Dean and her one-women Psychic Friends act rolled into the picture. She used to read tarot, check horoscopes, all that crap.

At midnight, the murder house is as quiet as it ever gets. A low murmur rises up from the floor. Tate’s down in the basement, cozied up with all Dr. Montgomery’s chimerical oogie-boogies. (Hope is, ultimately, not the only thing with feathers.) He knows they are there. They all leave Tate alone. He lights a few candles, and spreads an old camp blanket out on the cold cement. He sets the board up, smirking at the leering skull in one corner. You’d have to have a weak, stupid mind, he thinks, to be impressed by this shit.

“Tell me my future,” he tells the board. Demanding, because why should he be polite to whatever’s out there? “What’s going to happen?”

It takes a moment for the planchette to start moving. It circles the board for a moment, as if getting a sense for its footing. Under Tate’s fingertips, the surface of the wood feels hot. Fevered. The heart-shaped reader crawls over to HELLO.

“Well, hello there,” Tate mutters. “How terribly nice to meet you.” He fully expects someone to materialize across from him, to find out who’s fucking with him.

The planchette moves very, very slowly. Frustrated, he tries to push it along, but it bucks under his hands as if telling him to stop. Tate takes his fingers away; the board is working by itself. He moves his lips along with the letters as the message becomes gradually clear.

 **D-A-D-D-Y**

Tate recoils as if burned. Without thinking, he scoops up the whole board and throws it at the wall. In the darkness, the planchette spins in circles for hours. Someone is giggling, somewhere, and the secrets buzz like bees in a hive.  
 **the end.**

**Author's Note:**

> To Hildigunnur: thank you so much for a wonderful assignment. It was a joy writing this for you. Happy Yuletide!


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